In the corner, Audrey whistled.
That girl really had zero self-control.
“Oh?” Charlotte said.
“I guess that means you three will walk to town together,” Susan said. “It’s the same route.”
“Great,” Everett said.
“And Everett, I insist that you use Dad’s old coat,” Susan said. “Like he said, he hasn’t worn the thing since the seventies. It’ll get much more wear out there than it will in here.” She then leaned forward to whisper, “Plus, he can’t stop buying new winter clothes from catalogs. I didn’t even know people ordered from catalogs anymore. Frankly, he’s just as bad as a woman when it comes to shopping.”
Both Everett and Charlotte laughed, both grateful to have something to think about that wasn’t whatever this physical attraction was between them.
Or whatever it was.
Maybe it wasn’t physical.
It had been a long time since Charlotte had made a new friend.
Maybe this was what it felt like?
Charlotte watched as both Rachel and Everett shrugged into their winter coats. Christine rushed forward to shove a plate of pie into Everett’s hands.
“You probably don’t have much to snack on back at the Inn. The bistro will be open tomorrow, but there won’t be much going on. Zach’s hired a substitute to work over the wedding weekend to serve the few guests. I don’t want you to go hungry.” She pondered this for a moment, and then added, “If you want more food, we usually keep that door wide open. We always come in and out and take from the fridge as we like. I hope you know you can do the same.”
Everett looked overwhelmed. Charlotte wanted to protest, like, Sorry, my family is so overbearing.
But in reality, it was kind of nice, wasn’t it? That her family had spread her arms so wide for this stranger?
She didn’t want to belong to any other kind of family.
Outside, winter magic spread like a shimmering blanket across Martha’s Vineyard. Charlotte lifted her eyes toward the moon, dropped low in the night sky and casting everything in bluish light.
“They really don’t make nights like these out west,” Everett said.
“I’ve never been,” Charlotte said. “Maybe I don’t want to.”
Everett laughed. He stepped forward first, crunching through the first layer of snow. “I relish that sound,” he said. “It’s delicious. Like cracking the top of a crème brulee.”
“Ha. I’ve never thought of it like that,” Charlotte admitted.
Rachel scampered up ahead, crafting her own deep footsteps in the snow. Charlotte and Everett walked behind, both wordless. Charlotte could feel it: he wanted to know why her father had mentioned that “disaster” in his prayer. He had given her away.
But she was a widow. That was her reality.
It’s wasn’t like she wanted to hide it.
Still, it wasn’t the most fun topic of conversation.
When they reached town, Everett suddenly ducked to the side, grabbed a big bunch of snow, formed a super-fast snowball, and whacked it against Charlotte’s stomach.
It all happened so fast that Charlotte only had time to scream.
Rachel whipped around at the sound and looked at them, bug-eyed. After a long, frozen moment, both Charlotte and Everett burst into laughter.
Suddenly, the war began.
It was every man for him or herself.
Charlotte rushed toward the post office, where she drew together the first of many snowballs, spun around, and smashed a ball directly in Rachel’s back. Rachel hollered and turned to splash her mother with her own snowball. By the time it registered, Charlotte already had another ball prepared. She ran headlong toward Everett, making wild sounds, and then nabbed him on the upper bicep.
“Hey! I think that had ice in it!” Everett cried.
“Wait, really?” Charlotte’s pulse quickened.
“No.” At that, Everett shot a perfect snowball toward her; it smashed against her leg and disintegrated.
“You tricked me!” Charlotte said.
“Ha! Sucker!” Everett said.
The snowball fight went on another ten minutes or so, until the three of them stood, gasping for air with their hands on their knees.
“I forgot how tough it is to run through the snow,” Everett admitted.
“Yeah. I’m exhausted,” Charlotte said.
“Too exhausted to work, maybe?” Everett said sneakily.
“Naw.” Charlotte laughed. “But good try.”
“Ha. Well.” Everett glanced back toward the Sunrise Cove Inn. “I guess I’d better head back.”
“Sure. Everything okay there? You’re the only guest?”
“For the time being, yeah,” he said. “And it’s fun. A big, creaky inn, all to myself. Now that would be one hell of a Stephen King book.”
“Don’t let the ghosts bite,” Charlotte said.
Everett held her gaze for a moment. “Thanks for a beautiful Thanksgiving. I guess I’ll see you tomorrow before the rehearsal dinner.”
“Indeed,” Charlotte said. “Let the games begin.”
“You’re going to kill it,” he told her. “I’ve never seen anyone more capable.”
Rachel and Charlotte turned to walk the rest of the way to their house. Charlotte buzzed with anticipation. They had walked for a full two minutes in silence before Rachel said, “I’ve never seen anyone more capable,” in a voice that clearly resembled Everett’s darker one.
“What? He’s kind,” Charlotte said with a shrug.
“He likes you. I’ve never seen anyone crush so hard since Abby with this kid in art class,” Rachel teased.
“Don’t be silly. We’re working together. We’re basically in the same business. It’s good to meet new friends,” Charlotte insisted.
“I would tell you you’re being delusional, but I think you already know that,” Rachel retorted.
“Where do you come up with this stuff? You’re fourteen!”
Back inside, Charlotte brewed them some cups of hot cocoa, while Rachel snapped on a chick flick and burrowed herself in blankets on the couch. Charlotte checked her various messages, mostly from Ursula, Tobias, and Ursula’s mother.
URSULA: I just got word from the quintet. Apparently, they’re going to make it after all? Can you plz confirm.
URSULA: Charlotte? I need your go-ahead before I press play on these shoes. I wanted to wear these other ones, but what do you think of these?
URSULA: I went ahead and bought both pairs. You can help me decide when I arrive tomorrow.
URSULA: Finally, back in New York. Guess we’re on track. We are going to take all these supplements to beat the jet lag!
URSULA: Omg, Orion is being so difficult about his tux. I swear, men are such idiots, right?
URSULA: Are you getting these, Charlotte?
URSULA: CHARLOTTE?
URSULA: Okay. Call me when you get this.
Charlotte called Ursula that moment, but the call went straight to voicemail. Nothing Ursula, Tobias, or the mother of the bride had sent seemed pressing. They had just seemed like overly-anxious messages; the kinds people sent a few days before a huge, multi-million-dollar wedding.
Everything was in place.
Everything would be fine.
She had to believe it.
In a very strange way, having Everett tell her that had made her believe it even more.
She settled in beside Rachel with her hot cocoa. Rachel gave her an incredulous look.
“You’re already done?”
Charlotte shrugged. “I think it can wait till morning. All parties are headed our way. Tomorrow, Martha’s Vineyard will explode.”
“Ha. And you think you’ll be able to sleep tonight?” Rachel asked.
“Of course not,” Charlotte said with an ironic laugh. “But I’ll close my eyes and pray to God above that everything will go smoothly.”
“What do you think of Everett?” Rachel asked then.
“Not this ag
ain.”
“I’m just curious,” she said. “I don’t know.” She swallowed another gulp of hot cocoa, then added, “He makes snowballs almost as good as Dad.”
Charlotte’s heart sank. “Yes. He does.”
“But Dad’s hurt more,” Rachel said. “Or maybe I was just younger, so I thought they hurt more.”
It was their second winter without him. Both of them stewed in this fact for a moment, staring blankly at the rom-com as it whipped from one dramatic plot to another. Charlotte’s throat constricted.
“You know what your dad thought of rom coms?” she asked.
Rachel shook her head. A tear trickled down her cheek, but she didn’t make any motion to brush it off.
“He said that they were silly. And you know what? Every single time I convinced him to watch one, he complained about it for the first fifteen minutes, and then, by the end of it, he was mopping up his tears,” Charlotte said, smiling to herself.
“That’s ridiculous,” Rachel replied.
“I know. And he always made me promise never to tell anyone. Can you imagine what would have happened if one of his fishermen buddies had heard?”
“They would have never let him hear the end of it,” Rachel affirmed with a laugh. She squeezed her eyes shut again, then forced them open again. Tears lined her cheeks. “Thank you for telling me that. It changes him a little bit, but in a good way.”
“I’ll give you as many memories as I can of him, for as long as I can,” Charlotte said. “It’s all we can do to keep him with us.”
Before she turned out the light for the night, Charlotte blinked again at the old closet, still stocked-full of Jason’s old coats and shirts. She ran her fingers over the old flannel, inhaling the last lingering scent of that horrible fish.
“I still love you, you know,” she told the shirts, as though Jason himself could hear her.
Chapter Twelve
It was Friday: the day of reckoning.
This was what Everett wanted to text to Charlotte as a joke, if only he had taken her number. As it stood, he was all alone, a cup of coffee in hand and a piece of leftover pie on a plate there in the Sunrise Cove Inn. He watched the Sound as it shifted beneath the suddenly vibrant, winter blue sky, the kind that made it almost painful to look down at the snow. It was the sort of weather that would have allowed any plane in the world to land peacefully on that airstrip toward the southeastern part of the island.
This meant that everyone from the string quintet to Ursula Pennington herself would arrive without a problem.
Everett lined up his various lenses for the day, making little notes to himself about the celebrities he needed to include in photographs, as promised to his editor at Wedding Today. Before he knew it, he had constructed a whole page full of notes and also eaten one and a half slices of apple pie. Again, he glanced at his phone with the thought that he should call his mother.
Again, he retreated from this idea.
He didn’t want to ruin his good mood.
The rehearsal dinner was set for eight in the evening. According to Charlotte, the day before, Ursula had insisted that she didn’t want to actually “rehearse” the wedding itself. “She made something up about it being bad luck,” Charlotte had said, scrunching that cute nose of hers. “Like, I just know something is going to go wrong on the day-of because she basically insists on this.”
“What’s the point of a rehearsal dinner without the rehearsal itself?” Everett had asked.
“Good question. I guess, in her mind, it’s just more time to hobnob with all these celebrities coming to the island. It’s just another reason to drink champagne at a thousand dollars a pop.” She zipped her lips and resigned to Ursula’s ways. “I just want to make it out of the weekend alive and in one piece.”
“Alive? Maybe. Missing an arm? Also a maybe,” Everett had teased her.
Everett decided to go for a walk through the snow that afternoon, as a means to get his head screwed on correctly before the event that night. He was surprised to find the town bustling, as it had been more-or-less quiet the day before. He grabbed a cup of coffee at a little coffeehouse and watched as a young mother led her two toddlers across the little square, headed toward the antique carousel.
Everett hired a taxi to take him to the mansion near Edgartown, which Charlotte had booked for both the rehearsal dinner and the wedding and reception the following day. The taxi driver filled him with a number of facts about the old mansion, like how only ten or so celebrities had ever been married there, as it was difficult to reserve it. “The owners are pretty specific about who they allow to get married there. My hunch is that it’s because Charlotte Hamner is the wedding planner. They love the Montgomery and Sheridan girls over there. The whole island does.”
“I think I might have met them,” Everett said with a smile.
“Oh? That’s great. Treasure that. They don’t make a lot of ‘em like that anymore,” the driver said.
At the mansion, Everett stood in the snow, wearing that ridiculous hunting coat from the seventies, and took several photos of the exterior. The place echoed “winter wonderland” in almost every single way. It looked as though it had been taken from the top of the French Alps and dropped right there, at the edge of the Sound.
Suddenly, another taxi yanked up behind him.
“Hey, stranger.”
He turned to find Audrey, the pregnant daughter of Lola, drawing herself out slowly from the back of the taxi. The taxi driver hustled around and blared, “Audrey! I told you that I would help you out. For goodness sake, why don’t you ever listen?”
Audrey rolled her eyes. “I’m getting abuse from all sides.” She then removed several bills from her pocket and placed them in the driver’s hand. “Thank you for the ride and for changing the radio station. You know how I feel about disco.” She scrunched up her nose.
Everett had to laugh. The taxi driver shook his head violently and muttered something about, “Women in your condition,” before cutting back into the driver’s seat and rolling back through the snow.
“Sorry about that,” Audrey said and shrugged her shoulders.
“No worries. Always a pleasure to watch you make someone else uncomfortable.”
“What can I say? It’s something of a specialty.”
“Are you helping with the decorations?” Everett asked.
“To be honest with you, I think I might have missed most of it,” Audrey said. “My mother will be mad about it, but she’ll only give me five minutes’ worth of a hard time before she completely forgets.”
Everett laughed good-naturedly. He adjusted his camera strap around his neck. “Shall we?”
“I guess it’s time to join the chaos,” she agreed.
Together, they walked up the stone path toward the entrance of the mansion. When they reached the door, they heard Zach in the midst of what sounded to be a raucous fight with one of his staff members.
“I don’t know why you would ever, ever stir up a sauce like that, Marty! I mean, didn’t I train you well enough? Look at it. It’s already curdled on top. You have to start over...”
Audrey and Everett exchanged panicked glances.
This particular door spit them into a corridor near to the kitchen. When they entered, Christine popped out of the kitchen door and gave them a bug-eyed look.
“There you are,” she said.
“Sorry I’m late,” Audrey said.
“No worries. We’ve had plenty of help. Come on! It looks fantastic so far,” Christine said.
They followed Christine down the corridor, left, then right, until they fell into a glorious old-world ballroom, one with enormous ceilings that featured an elaborate mural. In awe, Everett lifted his camera and took several photos, hardly remembering to line them up. He hadn’t seen anything so beautiful since his last stint in Europe, more than five years before.
The ballroom itself was decorated elaborately, yet tastefully: exactly the way Wedding Today liked. White table
cloths were hung across long tables; chandeliers strung over them, glittering with soft light; and a Christmas tree was dressed to the nines in the center of the room, detailed with what looked like diamond “ice.” Given the expense of the wedding, Everett would have bet his bottom dollar the ice was made of actual diamonds.
Audrey reappeared without her coat. She wore a black dress, which bulged out beautifully over her pregnant belly. She walked toward the Christmas tree and blinked up toward the angel on top. The view was gorgeous: a new mother, on the verge of something else. Everett took a quick photo of her, hoping to give it to her later.
But Audrey, being Audrey, caught him in the act.
“What did you just do?” she demanded, stomping toward him.
Everett was at a loss for what to say. “I um...”
“Let me see it,” Audrey said. “I can decide whether or not you should delete it. I’m pretty self-conscious about the old belly, you know. I don’t know if I want to remember my fat years.”
“Ha. Okay. It’s a deal,” he said.
He passed his camera to her so she could flick through the last several, all of which featured her. Immediately, her face changed. Her eyebrows lowered.
For a long moment, Everett thought she might throw the camera on the ground with anger.
But when she lifted her face again, her eyes glittered with tears.
“I’ve never seen myself like that before,” she said.
Everett was at a loss for words.
“I look just like my mother when she was pregnant with me,” Audrey said. “I’ve heard people say it, of course—but I’ve never seen it so clearly. I...” She bit hard on her lower lip as she passed the camera back to Everett. “I can see why you’re as sought-after as you are. You’re clearly fantastic. Thank you.”
Before Everett could find an answer, Charlotte burst into the ballroom. She wore a glorious burgundy gown, cut low over her breasts and billowing out behind her thin waist and killer legs. Her brunette loose curls wafted behind her shoulders, pinned up half-way. Everett’s heart tap-danced across his chest. He lifted his camera again and snapped a photo. When he glanced at it in the reel, however, he knew: it would be difficult to fully capture the light behind Charlotte’s eyes.
A Vineyard Thanksgiving (The Vineyard Sunset Series Book 4) Page 8
